Vincent Arnold

I attended Black Hat this summer and participated in a course geared toward penetration test certification. The training was excellent and I acheived my goal of certification as a licensed penetration tester. Without going into to much detail regarding attendees in this course, I had to the privilege of being in the room with individuals responsibile for security for some of the largest companies as well as national and international government agencies. This wasn’t just a gathering of local security administrators. There were individual who attended from the middle east, Canada, Eastern Europe (Estonia and Slovenia particularly) and the US. I am sure there were more but that is all I can remember.

With the recent attack on Estonia’s Cyber Infrastructure and after attending this conference, I realized that we are heading down a path that could lead to the first Cyber War on a massive scale. The Cyber attack on Estonia was possibly a trial run and a potential precursor to a much larger attack. Many experts that have much more information and background on this subject than I have made the claim that we (US) are not paying enough attention to this very real threat. I don’t want to by any means minimize this, but in my mind, this is more of a threat to our country than any group of terrorist, terrorists or suicide bomber…You take down a country’s Cyber Infrastructure, you kill or cripple irreparably the country. This cannot be allowed to happen and we must do everything in our power to protect our cyber infrastructure.

Bear in mind, I am an average Joe with a bit of security experience and by no means an expert on this subject. But this threat is real, as evidenced by the attack on Estonia and it scares the bejeesus out of me.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 23rd, 2007 at 2:30 pm and is filed under Information Security.